One of the biggest pieces of news coming out of Oracle Open World this year is their launch of an Oracle NoSQL database. Fans of the hyper scalable data management schema are cheering – Big Red has finally caught on.
But there is more to the story. In May of this year Oracle published Debunking the NoSQL Hype a well-researched piece on the competitive advantages of RDBMSs vs NOSQL. It was written by one of Oracle’s premier database engineers – Alan Downing – who has 13 patents to his name and has been with Oracle for 18 years according to his LinkedIn profile. It is not a troll’s screed. Rather a philosophical treatment of the core differences between RDBMS and NoSQL. This is important because it lays out the vision of Oracle vis-a-vi information management.
Then in September, Oracle did an about-face, took the old whitepaper down (here is where it USED TO BE) and published this new one cheering Oracle’s new NoSQL path: Oracle NoSQL Database. Enter Open World and there is hype and hoopla over Oracle’s new NoSQL offering (and hadoop!).
Oracle is certainly big enough to have multiple products that attack the Big Data / Scalable Systems problem from many angles. Oracle is big enough to have solutions that are tailored to the needs of the customer – Big RDBMS for some NoSQL for others. So why the hiding? Why pull down Alan’s whitepaper? Do his comparisons and analysis suddenly error out?
Explain it Oracle. Don’t pretend it was never there. Paint the picture for us that in some situations companies need big RDBMS, in others NoSQL. Show us how they’re “engineered to work together” as is your tagline. Stop the paternalistic shenanigans.
End note: I personally think Oracle’s entry into the NoSQL space is a very good move. But the way they’re handling it is poor and Alan Downing probably deserves an apology from the PR department.
